Not as profound, yet still liberating and rewarding, were the results of LSD
experiments which a young Dane described to me with much humor and fantasy. He came from California, where he had been a houseboy for Henry Miller in Big Sur. He moved on to France with the plan of acquiring a dilapidated farm there, which he, a skilled carpenter, then wanted to restore himself. I asked him to obtain an autograph of his former employer for my collection, and after some time I actually received an original piece of writing from Henry Miller's hand.
A young woman sought me out to report on LSD experiences that had been of great significance to her inner development. As a superficial teenager who pursued all sorts of entertainments, and quite neglected by her parents, she had begun to take LSD out of curiosity and love of adventure. For three years she took frequent LSD trips. They led to an astonishing intensification of her inner life. She began to seek after the deeper meaning of her existence, which eventually revealed itself to her. Then, recognizing that LSD had no further power to help her, without difficulty or exertion of will she was able to abandon the drug. Thereafter she was in a position to develop herself further without artificial means. She was now a happy intrinsically secure person—thus she concluded her report. This young woman had decided to tell me her history, because she supposed that I was often attacked by narrow-minded persons who saw only the damage that LSD
sometimes caused among youths. The immediate motive of her testimony was a conversation that she had accidentally overheard on a railway journey. A man complained about me, finding it disgraceful that I had spoken on the LSD problem in an interview published in the newspaper. In his opinion, I ought to denounce LSD as primarily the devil's work and should publicly admit my guilt in the matter.
Persons in LSD delirium, whose condition could have given rise to such indignant condemnation, have never personally come into my sight. Such cases, attributable to LSD
consumption under irresponsible circumstances, to overdosage, or to psychotic predisposition, always landed in the hospital or at the police station. Great publicity always came their way.
A visit by one youn American girl stands out in my memory as an example of the tragic effects of LSD. It was during the lunch hour, which I normally spent in my office under strict confinement—no visitors, secretary's office closed up. Knocking came at the door, discretely but firmly repeated, until eventually I went to open.it. I scarcely believed my eyes: before me stood a very beautiful young woman, blond, with large blue eyes, wearing a long hippie dress, headband, and sandals. "I am Joan, I come from New York—you are Dr. Hofmann?" Before I inquired what brought her to me, I asked her how she had got through the two checkpoints, at the main entrance to the factory area and at the door of the laboratory building, for visitors were admitted only after telephone query, and this flower child must have been especially noticeable. "I am an angel, I can pass everywhere," she replied. Then she explained that she came on a great mission. She had to rescue her country, the United States; above all she had to direct the president (at the time L. B. Johnson) onto the correct path. This could be accomplished only by having him take LSD. Then he would receive the good ideas that would enable him to lead the country out of war and internal difficulties.
Joan had come to me hoping that I would help her fulfill her mission, namely to give LSD to the president. Her name would indicate she was the Joan of Arc of the USA. I don't know whether my arguments, advanced with all consideration of her holy zeal, were able to convince her that her plan had no prospects of success on psychological, technical, internal, and external grounds. Disappointed and sad she went away. Next day I received a telephone call from Joan. She again asked me to help her, since her financial resources were exhausted. I took her to a friend in Zurich who provided her with work, and with whom she could live. Joan was a teacher by profession, and also a nightclub pianist and singer. For a while she played and sang in a fashionable Zurich restaurant.
The good bourgeois clients of course had no idea what sort of angel sat at the grand piano in a black evening dress and entertained them with sensitive playing and a soft and sensuous voice. Few paid attention to the words of her songs; they were for the most part hippie songs, many of them containing veiled praise of drugs. The Zurich performance did not last long; within a few weeks I learned from my friend that Joan had suddenly disappeared. He received a greeting card from her three months later, from Israel. She had been committed to a psychiatric hospital there.
For the conclusion of my assortment of LSD visitors, I wish to report about a meeting in which LSD figured only indirectly. Miss H. S., head secretary in a hospital, wrote to ask me for a personal interview. She came to tea. She explained her visit thus: in a report about an LSD experience, she had read the description of a condition she herself had experienced as a young girl, which still disturbed her today; possibly I could help her to understand this experience.
She had gone on a business trip as a commercial apprentice. They spent the night in a mountain hotel. H. S. awoke very early and left the house alone in order to watch the sunrise. As the mountains began to light up in a sea of rays, she was perfused by an unprecedented feeling of happiness, which persisted even after she joined the other participants of the trip at morning service in the chapel. During the Mass everything appeared to her in a supernatural luster, and the feeling of happiness intensified to such an extent that she had to cry loudly. She was brought back to the hotel and treated as someone with a mental disorder.
This experience largely determined her later personal life. H.S. feared she was not completely normal. On the one hand, she feared this experience, which had been explained to her as a nervous breakdown; on the other hand, she longed for arepetitionof the condition. Internally split, she had led an unstable life. In repeated vocational changes and in varying personal relationships, consciously or unconsciously she again sought this ecstatic outlook, which once made her so deeply happy.
I was able to reassure my visitor. It was no psychopathological event, no nervous breakdown that she had experienced at the time. What many people seek to attain with the help of LSD, the visionary experience of a deeper reality, had come to her as spontaneous grace. I recommended a book by Aldous Huxley to her, The Perennial Philosophy (Harper, New York & London, 1945) a collection of reports of spontaneous blessed visions from all times and cultures. Huxley wrote that not only mystics and saints, but also many more ordinary people than one generally supposes, experience such blessed moments, but that most do not recognize their importance and, instead of regarding them as promising rays of hope, repress them, because they do not fit into everyday rationality.
11. LSD Experience and Reality
Was kann ein Mensch im Leben mehr gewinnen
Als dass sich Gott-Natur ihm offenbare?
What more can a person gain in life
Than that God-Nature reveals himself to him?
—Goethe
I am often asked what has made the deepest impression upon me in my LSD
experiments, and whether I have arrived at new understandings through these experiences.
Valious Realities
Of greatest significance to me has been the insight that I attained as a fundamental understanding from all of my LSD experiments: what one commonly takes as "the reality," including the reality of one's own individual person, by no means signifies something fixed, but rather something that is ambiguous—that there is not only one, but that there are many realities, each comprising also a different consciousness of the ego.